Discovering and Explaining “Sexual Transgressions:”
Sexuality and Gender Constructions Among Latina Mothers and Daughters
Lorena GarcĂa, Asst. Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago
Thirty-eight-year-old Theresa Crespo, a Puerto Rican mother of two teenage daughters,
proudly showed me pictures of her daughters as we sat in her living room. It was a humid
August afternoon in Chicago and all the windows in her modest second floor apartment were
open as a fan sitting in a corner attempted to cool down the small Humboldt Park apartment. At
one point, Theresa excused herself to lean out the window. She was checking up on her
daughters, sixteen-year-old Irene and thirteen-year-old Jeanne, who were sitting on the
building’s front stairs talking to some girlfriends when I arrived for the interview. Spotting her
youngest daughter standing on the curb, talking to two neighborhood boys in a black Cadillac,
she yelled out the window, “Jeanne! ¿Que tu haces [What are you doing]?!” With that, her
daughter walked away from the curb and the car drove off, setting off car alarms along the street
with the bass from the hip-hop music emanating from it. Satisfied that her daughter was
behaving, Theresa moved away from the living room window and told me:
Esa nena [that girl], she is something else! I don’t like those boys she was talking to…I
worry about her, she’s always acted older than her age. She thinks she’s all grown up,
you know? She wants to wear sexy this and that. But she learns it from la otra (the other
one), you know, Irene. I’ve been talking to them, you know, about sex y d’eso [and that].
I’m keeping an eye on them, no quiero ninguna sorpresas [I don’t want any surprises]!
(She says this as she makes the shape of a pregnant belly with her hands).
Theresa, like many of the Latina mothers that participated in my study, discussed the
challenges she encountered in her efforts to raise her daughters to be proper young women,
which were always intimately connected to their emerging sexuality. Mothers frequently
reported that they regarded this responsibility as the most difficult, yet most meaningful one in
Lorena GarcĂa
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